The Doctor Dreams
by LS of ACO
Summary: Nine can only dream of one thing. Sometimes from different perspectives, or at different points, but it all comes back to the same horror.  A bit of a drabbly mess.
1. Dreaming

The Doctor lay his head back, sighed, closed his eyes, and waited for it to begin.

It didn't happen immediately; after all, even with Academy training, and even as tired as he was after a day of slightly above average madness (which was saying a lot for him), it took him a moment to fall asleep. Falling was hardly even the word anymore, really. It had become more like jumping, diving, or, if he was going to be cynical, like drowning someone. That last really was what it was most like, he thought. He had to force his conscious mind roughly under the dark waters of oblivion, and hold it there until it gave up struggling and stilled. For struggle it did; it knew what lay beneath those waters, what lurked in the not-so-murky depths of his subconscious, just below the surface.

Even when he was awake there were flashes of it. Sometimes, if it was particularly quiet around him, or if his eyes were closed, or if he stood too still, it would start even if he was fully awake; the roar of that internal ocean was always there. It couldn't be stopped, or if it could he was at a loss to how. It could only be drowned out by senses and thoughts and Rose and Jack and being clever and saving civilizations…the whole bit together was usually enough to drown it out. But all of that went away when he slept. When he slept there was only one thing, one dream. Different times and different forms, different parts; but only one thing. It was all the same thing, really.

The knowledge that he hadn't dreamt of anything else in so long disturbed him almost as much as the dreams themselves did; this was not how Time Lords were supposed to dream. It was in their nature to dream, not of the past, but of the future, of the manifold possible futures that they half-sensed before them. It was rare for a Time Lord to dream of the past, of memories; he remembered in the old days he used to cherish those dreams. They were like doing the impossible and crossing his own timeline, reliving the moments of importance. He had felt that they gave him insight into himself, let him come to understand himself more. He didn't feel that way anymore. He did not want any more insight into the hours he now visited while he slept. And he certainly did not want to understand the man he had been then or the man he was now, the man that those hours had made him. Not anymore.

He dreamt of the War, of course. That was all. There was never anything else to look forward to in sleep, anymore. It was always the War. Even Rose hadn't managed to find her way into his dreams yet, and he hoped desperately that someday, one day soon, she would; he didn't quite realize consciously how badly he longed for that, how much he wanted to dream about her, something so very _not_ the War, so alive and innocent and human and small. Everything the war was not. Maybe one day, he half-thought as he felt his consciousness begin to give up the struggle, realizing, as it did every night, that the rough hand of his training was stronger, that it would drown and might as well get it over with. Maybe one day he would get to dream of Rose.

But not tonight. Tonight, he sensed immediately as he slipped into darkness, it was the War again.

Some nights it the earlier days, and that wasn't so bad. It hadn't really been that bad, at first. The first few battles, the prison days, reuniting with old comrades from his academy days who weren't quite yet desperate enough to hide their disdain for him… and driving them all up the wall as a matter of course. It was still horrible, of course, the worst of all his adventures up to that point; but that was the thing, really. It was like part of the old adventures. He was still the man he had been, then. Long hair and dashing smile and slightly silly clothes. Eyes that people could stand to look into, at least when he wanted them to be able to. He would have almost enjoyed dreaming about the early days, if they hadn't reminded him so strongly of what came before and after; what he lost, and how he lost it.

Sometimes it was the end, watching from space as wave after wave of Dalek ships descended upon Gallifray, as the orange sky turned to the red and green of actual energy weapons – such a novelty by that stage of the war, when battles were fought in 18-dimensional hypertime from infinite angles of causality, space and para-consciousness, with the very fabric of reality serving as weapons, and the nightmares creeping in from all sides as the universe itself bled… But Gallifray was defended from that sort of thing, at least for a while, while the causality shields and consciousness locks held. So the Daleks had blasted through the first four dimensions of shielding with simple three-dimensional weapons, the kind they might have used in their racial infancy, when they might have been something of a threat to the lesser races, but could never _possibly_ threaten Gallifray.

It took them a few hours to get through that way, after which the other 14 dimensions of shielding of course collapsed and the slaughter began in earnest, but in that brief time while the shields held Gallifray had remained an island of sanity in the indescribable madness that was the Time War, unravaged by horrors of the last tenth of the War, when it became not just a Time War but also Dream War, a Nightmare War, a Vortex War…a Reality War, and an Unreality War. Ironic, the Doctor had mused bitterly at the time, watching the lights of simple three-dimensional weapons in attack and defense, that Gallifray should be the last bastion of sanity in the timelock; everyone on the planet had apparently gone insane at some point since his last visit.

Sometimes it was the very, very end, and that was always the worst, reliving that; standing there, feeling himself push the button and end…everything. No, no, not everything, he had screamed hysterically in his mind; or had it been out loud? He'd never know. There had been no on there to hear it, because he'd killed _all of them._ Everyone, everything. No, not everything, please no, not everything, that's what I was trying to stop, and he knew on some level, in some tiny sane corner of his mind, that he had stopped it, and that it wasn't everything, but God it felt like everything. So much burning. Everything burning. Everyone burning. And then the fire took him too and he was glad of it, glad to feel his body burn away; let it boil down to the nothing below the smallest particles and start again, it was the only way he would ever be clean of this, could ever be cleansed of what he'd just done. But then the fires of regeneration had joined the fires of death, and he'd screamed at them with both his voices, old and new, that no, it wasn't time yet, he wasn't clean, he could still remember, he could still _see it_, and God they were still screaming…

It wasn't any of that tonight, however. Tonight began, as the nights always did, with random flashes, brief moments from the War, made up of only a few sensory memories. The full experience would come later, as he entered deeper sleep. He saw flashes of the battle of Antaria, which he'd lived through twice, once with the Nightmare Child and once without. This was the version without, the original version, when it was still a relatively simple five-dimensional temporal battle, without para-consciousness thrown in.

He saw the Medusa Cascade swarming with creatures from the Not-Quite-Void, and a thousand Dalek ships being devoured by them. He relived the realization of that moment; that it was possible to go too far with these new weapons. After that, of course, the consequences of reality weapons were well-known by both sides, and they learned how to minimize the strain on the walls of the world, and were prepared for the swarms that did come.

He never saw himself sealing the rift in that battle; they'd told him he'd done it, and she'd thanked him for it, but if he had, that moment was forever lost to him. He privately suspected that he'd had nothing to do with it, that he'd only fallen unconscious the once, not been knocked out, woken up and somehow magically sealed the rift, only to be knocked out again to find her standing over him, smiling that otherworldly smile and thanking him for saving all of them. The more he'd thought about that moment, the more sure he'd become that she was the one who sealed the rift, and that what she'd said after had been for her own purposes. Of course, it hadn't occurred to him not to take credit for it at the time. His memory had still been a bit blurry, and it did sound like the sort of thing he'd do, and one does not return to consciousness to be thanked by a beautiful, if tangibly unworldly, girl for saving her life and civilization only to reply "I did nothing of the sort," even when one is a Time Lord.

He heard, but did not see, a part of that memory. "You are meant t' do great things for this world," said the lilting voice, drifting across his sleeping mind.

He hoped that that would be the dream tonight, more of the battle of the Medusa Cascade. That had really been his finest hour in the War, even if his suspicions were correct and sealing the rift had not been his doing. But he felt himself slipping deeper after that unworldly voice faded, and the last remnants of consciousness braced themselves for what they knew was coming, as a reddish glow and the sound of screams began to fade in. Tonight would not be the Cascade, resplendent with light and heroics and noble self-sacrifice, but very little loss of life on the Time Lord side. Tonight it was the panicked, desperate flight, the infinite possible deaths, and the screams of his comrades in the fleet as they lived through every one of them.

Tonight, it was Arcadia.

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**To be continued...**

**Author's Note: Ooooh look at me, posting a multi-chapter story, aren't I shiny? This story has kind of a nebulous genesis; I wanted to write a oneshot or or two of battles in the Time War, because I'd read a few of those and wished there were more, and had my own ideas about the nature of the hell the War devolved into. But I was reluctant to write a serious 8fic when I've still not partaken of any official Eighth Doctor media and am still derusting as a writer, so the idea just kind of stewed for a bit. Then I separately wanted to write a short story about Nine dreaming, sort of in semi-preparation for a very odd story idea I have...and then I realized that Nine would probably dream about the Time War, and that if I combined the two ideas it would not only cover for any factual and characterization issues arising from my unfamiliarity with all things Eight and before, since it would be taking the form of a dream and therefore not necessarily what actually happened, but that I could slip in a few other ideas I had...and here we go. Will be updated upon sufficient review! If no one cares I'll just keep this story to myself. ;)  
**


	2. Burning

The planet burned. Not just the rock of the planet, though that was burning too, bursting into impossible sickly green flames even as it also melted into lava, but _everything_. The buildings, the people, the sky, the ships and satellites in orbit, the very space around the planet, the very time that flowed through it. Reality itself burned. The very _idea_ of Arcadia burned, burned from mind, burned from history and space and time and reality.

And it was not a clean burning. This was no simple erasure or efficient, classically-Dalek extermination. The Cruciform would have allowed for such a thing, of course, much more easily than this summoning of hell, but the Cruciform's new masters, for once, wanted more than extermination. The Daleks were making a showcase of Arcadia, a preview of their planned, and, it now seem, inevitably-destined destruction of Gallifrey. It was not done vindictively; the Daleks had little to no concept of vindication. This was meant to inspire fear, horror, and hopelessness, to shock and awe the Time Lord enemy. The Daleks had come to understand their enemies' weaknesses very well, and even now, with victory all-but assured and the greatest weapons of Time Lord science under their control, they did not stop exploiting them. They had become so very good at this.

The Cruciform shone so brightly in the sky that it drowned out the twin suns as completely as they drowned out the stars. It pulsed with crimson light so strong that the light alone could almost have destroyed the planet; and perhaps in one reality it was doing so. The great weapon of time was blasting through reality, bringing forth into being every possible destruction of every possible Arcadia; one of those must have included a death by light. Meteors rained down upon the planet from realities and times where it passed through the great outland swarm, phasing in and out of existence as the Cruciform ensured that none impacted the Dalek ships which blanketed the planet, raining fire upon it with more traditional weapons. It did not bother to protect itself in the same fashion; the meteors which struck it simply dissolved permanently as they entered the crimson glow.

The continents cracked and shattered along every possible faultline, burying cities and nations under tons of rock, crushing millions – who were then brought back to life as the cracks were repaired, so that they could face death in some other way. Cities and people from different realities and times were spliced on top of one another, mutilated horribly as they were forced to occupy the same space and time; every Arcadia was here, every Arcadia was now, and every Arcadia was dying.

Every possible disease swept the planet, every possible war from every possible time. Ancient brigands swarmed through the cities, ransacking them; primitive artillery shelled the advancing armies of rebellions against every possible authority. Sontaran cruisers joined the Dalek saucers in bombardment, and huge Racnoss stars, and the ships of countless other civilizations, known and unknown. Somewhere, in some world and possible time, these ships had attacked Arcadia, and now those possibilities were being made here and now, as reality bled helplessly under the Cruciform's blazing assault.

The Reapers descended upon the planet like flies, devouring the chaos, folding it back into time, and in the end only adding to the destruction. They swarmed over the Cruciform frantically, personifications of time's pain, trying desperately to end the paradox, this joke being made of time, but the Cruciform merely devoured them just as they did their victims, using the time energy that made them up as fuel for its attack on time. The more of them came, the more power the Cruciform had to cancel out their sterilization. But the Dalek brains directing the machine refrained from completely blocking them from accessing the planet; after all, they were wonderful agents of destruction and fear themselves.

Even the Time Lord fleet, which had fought so valiantly and foolishly against the Dalek fleet those few short hours ago, not realizing until too late that the Cruciform lay at the heart of the enemy formation, and which had come to Arcadia to seek refuge in the temporal safeguard after the Daleks' dazzling victory, was not immune to the madness. The screams of millions of Gallifrayan warriors echoed through the sky on every psychic wavelength as they were caught in the fire as well; a TARDIS's shields were no match for the Cruciform. It destroyed them from inside out, or forced them into one of the infinite destructions of the planet below, or simply set them ablaze. Their occupants were helpless. No Time Lord science could stand against the very pinnacle of Time Lord science, the very might of reality itself. Every ship in the fleet burned, and screamed.

All but one.

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**To be continued...**

**Author's Note: Ooooh look at me, actually updating a multi-chapter story, aren't I shiny? Yes, one is the sufficient number I spoke of. But more reviews would of course be very nice. As might be obvious, this was originally just the intro for a somewhat longer chapter, but I realized that this part made sense on its own, had a nice cliffhangery ending, that standards for chapter length on this site are not incredibly high, and that saving the rest gave me more time to write the chapter I'm working on now, which is proving difficult to make not suck. Also, I don't know why I misspelled Galifrey in the first chapter. I am ashamed. Just write it off to my being American and stupid. I've probably left out a U somewhere too. Sigh.**


	3. Flying

An old noncombatant type 40, which should have been unfit for duty in any combat zone, much less the slaughter of the ages, cut a mad path through the devastation, spinning in an impossible number of directions at once, dodging fire and meteors and bombs, changing direction instantaneously with no regard for inertia, gravity, or any other principle of lower physics. It swooped around the gaping holes in reality, nimbly slipped through the cracks to and from alternate universes, and phased through the weapons fire from the odd Dalek saucer that thought that this particular TARDIS wasn't being destroyed in quite enough ways.

The chameleon circuit, long-since repaired, over the Doctor's protests, by incredulous engineers who could not decide whether it was more ridiculous that he had refused to take a newer, more appropriate model of TARDIS with his new rank (the insignia of which he refused to wear, stubbornly persisting in wearing a crude tin-foil mockery of a lowly engineer's insignia, which he said had been given to him by a friend, instead of his proper insignia) or that the TARDIS he insisted was the only method of transport for him was in such appalling disrepair, flicked the TARDIS from form to form faster than the eye could register, desperately trying to keep up the illusion that this TARDIS was burning in the Cruciform's fire like all the others in the fleet.

The Doctor stood in the console room, his face blackened by ash, clothing in tatters, frantically realigning the psychic deflectors that let the chameleon circuit's representations of a dying/invisible/not-a-TARDIS TARDIS fool the Reapers, Seekers, and the para-consciousness monitors on the largest Dalek ships. He was alone; his crew had been killed in the insane attack on the Dalek fleet, just a few hours ago. A jury-rigged psychic remote dangled from the back of his neck, clipped to his upper spine, allowing him to fly the TARDIS hands-free. He needed his hands to align the deflectors, and it was absolutely critical that both flight and deflection be flawless.

The illusion had to be perfect to fool the all-but unfoolable para-consciousness monitors, which only avoided being entirely unfoolable because they weren't looking for this kind of deception, and the flight had to be perfect to avoid the nine billion destructions of Arcadia around him, and to get the _hell_ out of here before the _real_ threats started showing up. The modified and boosted chameleon circuit would fool the Daleks, and the combination of the circuit and the deflectors would fool the PCMs and Reapers, and _probably_ the Seekers – they hadn't cut his shielding and disintegrated him yet, so so-far-so-good. But nothing would fool the outtime monsters. And that was only the beginning of what would arrive shortly, if the Cruciform kept blazing away at the fabric of the universe. The Time War had raged a very, very long time, and as the two sides blasted holes in time and space into the void and the Not-Quite-Void, the things that gnawed at the world from the outside and the inside-of-the-inside had begun to take notice, to learn to recognize the signs of easy food, and to swarm. The combatants knew them as well as they did their enemies, now.

Blood dripped from his eyes like tears as he used the enhanced psychic link to guide the TARDIS through a pocket of the Vortex which had been cut off by the maelstrom the Daleks were fashioning from Arcadia's existence. He briefly hoped it might be a window out of Arcadia's temporal safeguard, but no such luck; it was only a fragment, completely cut off from the main Vortex. Even in his panic and horror, he couldn't help but marvel at the power required to do such a thing, to literally break time, without that even being the specific goal; it went far beyond causing a paradox of causality. This was more akin to causing a paradox of _existence._ The Cruciform really was the ultimate weapon.

He sucked in his breath as he felt the TARDIS scrape the side of a closing dimensional gate, and wondered for the first time in so many words if he would make it. The damnable temporal safeguard hadn't slowed the Daleks down at all, with the Cruciform fully powered up from feeding on the time energy of the TARDISes destroyed in the Time Lord fleet's foolhardy attack a few hours ago, but it was making certain that none of Arcadia's defenders could escape. So much irony in this war, the Doctor thought: here we are, caught against our own defenses, being slaughtered by our own weapon, which is being wielded by a race that would never even have known about time travel, much less time warfare, if not for us. The temporal safeguard wouldn't collapse until Arcadia had been completely annihilated, and by then it would be far too late. The Daleks had turned a fortress into a trap.

He felt the telltale vertigo of the monsters from beyond the tears beginning to creep into the back of his mind, and grimly sonic'd the necklace into tripling its output. The absolute last thing he needed at the moment was void visions. The necklace probably wouldn't last long at that rate – it had been showing signs that whatever mysterious force powered it was running out – but he wouldn't last at all without it. As whatever made the necklace work – he had never been able to work out quite what it was, only how to speed up and slow down its action – accelerated, he felt that tingles in his mind recede, for the time being.

He thought briefly of the girl who'd given it to him, in the battle of the Medusa Cascade; she'd said it was in thanks for saving her life. She'd been from beyond this world, beyond any world, from a city in the Not-Quite-Void. The outtimers weren't all monsters, she'd said; there were whole shining civilizations out there, which had no real existence as inhabitants of an actual universe understood the terms "real" or "exist", but which she had come from nonetheless. The monsters fought the intimers, she saw, and her people fought the monsters, so they were on the same side (he did not explain to her that the intimers were fighting each other, and that the monsters were only incidental), and she'd seen how he sealed the rift like that; he could be a great Maker among her people, if he wanted to come back. If she could exist like this here, she'd said, looking at her bluish-white hand strangely, he could probably exist like they did back there. It would be peaceful there, with him to help them Make, and they could keep the monsters away forever. He could leave this war behind.

Perhaps if he had not been fresh from his finest hour, he would have said yes.

But he'd refused, and she'd looked sad, but said she'd known he would; and then she'd given him the necklace, seemingly from nowhere, and told him that it would protect him in days to come. "Do remember, lord of time," she'd said to him in her lilting voice, "you are a Maker, like t' me. You are meant t' do great things for this world." Then she'd smiled, and the light had shown through her teeth as she'd faded back into outtime.

It was the necklace which had protected him and the TARDIS from the Cruciform's first shuddering wave of attack, which had set all the other TARDISes ablaze, and which continued to protect him now. He thought, given its origins, that how the necklace worked had something to do with the Not-Quite-Void, which wasn't saying much; outtime was not very well understood by a race which was, after all, even more closely tied to intime, to time-time, than most universal beings. All they really knew was that it was a world beyond the world, between the actual worlds and the void, which did not exist causally, temporally, or physically, yet was nonetheless somehow there; most interestingly of all, it had _profound_ psychic existence, and could be influenced by (and in turn influence) something theorists called acausal para-consciousness resonance, which no one really understood but which basically boiled down to being a quality of sentience roughly comparable to psychic ability, which had no apparent existence, or effects upon anything, in the physical universe, but had limited existence in the void proper and massive existence in the Not-Quite-Void, if it ever reached it. It had been termed antithought by some ancient Time Lord temporal philosopher with his tongue in his cheek, relating it to antimatter in the physical universe.

There were a number of outlandish theories about outtime and acausal para-consciousness resonance, including that the Not-Quite-Void was the afterlife, the world of dreams, the collective unconscious, the world of imagination, merely a different part of the void where the void residue was more dense, the place where the theorist's deity of choice was hiding from all attempts at scientific data collection, a remnant of the hypothetical previous system of universality and existence, or itself a hallucination, a side effect of the War on the very nature of sentience; consciousness was thought in some circles of temporal philosophy to be directly tied to time, and time had been badly damaged by the War. It was more than possible, thought the Doctor detachedly (you're wandering, going delirious from blood loss, probably shock too, and it's going to kill you, a deeper part of his mind muttered) as he phased the TARDIS through an Arcadian defense vessel being engulfed by time weapons from some horrible possible future, using the time distortion to accelerate, that the War had truly descended into madness in the most literal sense, and that all of this para-consciousness stuff was mass insanity, the product of whatever horrible damage the War's time distortions were doing to the collective unconscious.

But whatever outtime was, it had taken a place of great importance in the later days of the War, when breaking the fabric of reality had become commonplace, and the monsters had begun to creep in in every battle, sometimes doing more damage than either side. Acausal para-consciousness resonance had gone from vague, abstract, impractical theory to a key weapon in the war; essentially, the things from the other side could be affected by thought of precisely the right kind, either destroyed or, more dangerous to attempt but also more advantageous, controlled, and brought to one side or the other. This had made the Doctor a force to be reckoned with in the late battles, and the do-overs of the early battles that came when the Nightmare Child broke down the temporal safeguards; there were other factors to the strength of one's para-consciousness resonance, but the main things were imagination and sheer force of will, and the Doctor was nothing if not stubborn and brilliant.

But the things from Not-Quite-Void could also affect thought even as they were affected by it, to the point almost of possession; and just as the Daleks had come to understand very well the nature of fear and its value as a weapon in the war, so had the monsters. Void visions, as the mental effects of the smaller monsters were called, had caused each side to lose many a battle. But they were not the extent of the effect of the things from the Not-Quite-Void on the minds of time warriors.

The Doctor jumped, his hands slipping from the deflector controls, as he heard (and somehow felt with every other sense at once) the ominous keening of the Nightmare Child. It made a different sound to everyone, or so he'd gathered; some people said it was the sound that would frighten the person who heard it above all other sounds. One of his pilots – I never even learned his name, the Doctor realized abruptly – had told him after the battle of Torikoaan, where he'd heard it for the first time, that to him it sounded, and felt, like his bones being ground to dust inside his body. The Doctor had always vindictively hoped that to the Daleks it sounded much like the grinding whoosh of an old type 40 TARDIS with the secondary breaks on; but that was probably just wishful thinking on the part of his ego, and he knew it.

He hurriedly put his hands back on the deflector controls, realizing vaguely that both they and the controls were covered in blood, and that he was shaking. Too much psychic exertion through the link, he thought with a small corner of his mind, as most of it was taken up by running the deflectors and flying the TARDIS through the psychic link. Probably compounded by the void visions and whatever this necklace does. Causing minor internal bleeding, not life-threatening for several minutes. He didn't mention, in his internal explanation, that several minutes had already passed. Nor did he mention that given what he had just heard, void visions were about to be the absolute least of his worries.

They weren't sure if the Nightmare Child was the same creature – if it could be called a creature – every time, or if it was a form common in the outtime, or if it was really a cohesive entity at all instead of just a side effect of the presence of so many hostile outtime creatures in intime. What it actually was didn't really matter, as both sides had so far been completely unable to do any damage to it, with either physical or para-consciousness weapons; what mattered was what it did. It took void visions to the next level, infecting every being around it with fear that went so far beyond anything anyone had seen before that they hadn't even realized that fear was the source at first. It drove its victims out of their minds, made them lose all sense of self and reality; the theory was that it burned out their minds, and used the empty shells para-consciousness resonance to sustain its existence in intime.

It had appeared in every major battle for several years now, as the cracking in the universe inevitably became too severe as both sides blasted each other with polydimensional reality weapons. It took a different form to each observer, but it was always massive. After the battle of the Alexandria Core, where the entire seventeenth Dalek fleet and a good part of the planet below had fallen to it, it had become so strong that it had rampaged off through the War's past, breaking through the temporal safeguards around the major battles, and appearing even in the early days of the War to feed on minds unprepared with para-consciousness monitors. After that, many sections of the War were now timelocked outright; unlike a temporal safeguard, a timelock was permanent and all-but unbreakable, at least from physical/temporal causality standpoint. The Doctor wouldn't have been terribly surprised if the Nightmare Child, or something else from the outtime, found some way around the timelocks from the outside of the universe, or the inside-of-the-inside, if it became powerful enough. Nothing seemed truly secure anymore.

The TARDIS shook as it spun too close to a pillar of energy that was engulfing some potential space elevator, never built in this reality, but apparently present in at least one other, and therefore being subjected to the same infinite destruction as the rest of Arcadia. The Doctor fell, and cried out, but kept his hands on the controls. Not that it would matter for much longer, he thought bitterly, pulling himself up from what he dimly realized was a puddle of his blood on the floor of the console room. The deflectors wouldn't stop the Nightmare Child from sensing (it felt right to assign consciousness to it, malevolence, though it was entirely possible it was simply a force of nature beyond causal understanding) his intact (or, well, mostly-intact, he thought sardonically) mind inside the not-really-burning-yet TARDIS, and then he'd go genuinely mad, and that would be the end of all of it, the end of everything, because he was damn sure that no one else in the fleet had avoided being caught in the fire in that first wave, and if he didn't get out of this temporal safeguard and back to Gallifrey, or some bastion of Time Lord power, and warn them, soon it would be Gallifrey burning like this. And then the whole universe, the whole of every universe, now that the Daleks could break down the walls between the worlds with the Cruciform. Maybe they would even figure out some way to use the Cruciform to break through to the Not-Quite-Void, and exterminate the shining civilizations that didn't exist that the girl who'd given him the necklace had spoken of.

He swung the TARDIS through another gap in reality, frantic now to find some small gap in the temporal safeguard through which he might escape. The gap led to a parallel world, but all parallel worlds were the same now when it came to Arcadia. Every Arcadia was the same Arcadia, all brought together, engulfed in endless destruction, and all surrounded by the temporal safeguard. I would, he thought bitterly, be born in the one reality of all possible realities to have this mad War. Then it occurred to him that the very gap that had caused this to occur to him was proof that it didn't really matter anymore, because the War was in every reality now, and would bleed over even more in the hours to come, and that in fact maybe it was better to be from the reality that was the source of this madness so that it didn't feel like quite so much of a cheat when he was destroyed by it; he gave a small coughing laugh at that. It seemed funny, in his mind's disorganized state. Blood splattered onto the deflector controls.

And then two things happened almost at the same time, as if the second were a taunting child of the first and the twisted fate that it seemed to the Doctor had been guiding the whole of the War. The first was the miracle he had hoped for; he could see ahead of him, with the TARDIS's external sensors, a gap the temporal safeguard. He gave a strangled cry of relief, and spun the TARDIS towards it.

The second thing was that the necklace abruptly stopped working. It was as if whatever mysterious force powered it was watching his progress through the storm of death around him, and wanted to tease him with a bit of hope before letting him burn with the rest of the world. There was a very, very brief instant after the necklace cut off where he realized what had happened; there was no time for a coherent thought, just the beginnings of an emotion he vaguely recognized as utter despair. Then the TARDIS was hit.

He felt the onslaught as a single wave, although it doubtless had thousands of components. The TARDIS was struck from every side at once by the Cruciform's attack, and it and its pilot immediately joined the rest of their fleet in burning; it seemed to explode and implode simultaneously, and he briefly felt and saw fire streak across every surface before his mind went horrifyingly blank, as the Nightmare Child's power crashed through him without the necklace's protection. He screamed, and clawed at his head. In a tiny corner of his mind he had the idea that the strengthened psychic link must be boosting his receptiveness, and that the necklace had somehow been compensating for that as well without his realizing; perhaps that was what had drained its remaining power so quickly. But most of his mind was inhospitable to thoughts like this, or any kind of thought; he knew only terror, and pain.

And then suddenly it was over, he was through the gap, wonder of wonders he'd made it through. He was out of the temporal safeguard, and he sensed, as consciousness slipped away from him, that the TARDIS was taking him somewhere. That was quite fine with him; anywhere was fine as long as it wasn't back to Arcadia. All he felt was relief. The Nightmare Child was gone, the fire was gone, the TARDIS wasn't being destroyed anymore, although it certainly did seem to be in pretty bad shape, and now someone in a Gallifreyan uniform was bursting through the door and yelling something he couldn't make out over the ringing in his ears, and that was really quite rude of them to burst into his TARDIS like that without asking, and he resolved that he would tell them so as soon as he was done passing out.

The Doctor slumped to the floor of the console room, and his tattered clothes began to smolder as they touched the metal floor, still glowing from the fire that had enveloped it.

* * *

**I won't say to be continued this time, because honestly it probably won't be, though I still have hopes. I know where it goes, but I can't get the next bit to not suck, and I'm busy with other things, other stories, at the moment, so continuation will take a while if it ever happens.**


End file.
